February 2008
The Archives
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02.27.08Best Twitter evangelical post, yetStumbled on to this Newbies Guide to Twitter. Twitter introduction posts tend to vary not in their excitement for the service but rather in their explanation of its core value. Chris Brogan did an excellent job and hence gets some link love. Groovy.
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02.27.08The cost of being offlineWhat a shame. I tried to submit an order with Turner Motorsport but gave up. I tried three times actually. Each attempt, after entering the same information, ended with a lovely 500 server error. Sad when you try to give someone your money and they won't (or can't) take it. Off to a competitor...
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02.22.08The conservative view of profitsI love Greg Mankiw's blog. Reading it is a little like auditing his lectures and only catching the witty interjections. Critiquing Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope: The most surprisingly honest sentence so far (page 156): the conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight--that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie--contained a good deal of truth. The sloppiest sentence so far (page 146): ...
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02.21.08What a brand isMost blogging software allows you to tag posts with subject descriptions. Steve Jobs, Books, TechCrunch -- whatever the post is about. I like this feature for two reasons: It organizes the author's content by making filtering possible. I can glance across the writer's past posts, and make a snap judgement on subscribing to his feed. I recently looked at my own categories and realized something. The companies I muse about here often make it as categories. Scanning the seemingly homogeneous labels, the words that jumped out at me were all brands. ...
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02.20.08Contrarian views of oddsThe United States is poised to shoot down a failing government satellite any day now. It malfunctioned quickly after being placed into orbit. The Department of Defense contends the hydrazine fuel aboard the dying satellite is toxic and poses a great enough risk to warrant destruction. The US Navy will use a missile to destroy the satellite, a technique that was successfully proven by the Chinese a year ago. As it's not terribly uncommon for de-orbiting satellites to fall to earth, many question if the mission is a guise to demonstrate similar capabilities. Politics aside, I found the ...
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02.16.08Paul Graham’s 6 step guide to creating valueIn all it's glory: Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly. Or if I may paraphrase, "just start." [From paulgraham.com]
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02.16.08Euphemism of the dayFrom a Twitter job listing: Experience executing: well planned and tested solutions to complex problems, goal oriented workdays with multiple context changes and interruption. I think they meant to say the applicant will work long hours and suffer from induced ADD.
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02.15.08Men are from YouTube, Women are from CBSThere is a line in the sand when it comes to video online: content produced by the user and the stuff from traditional media networks. Behavioral differences were discovered by a Nielsen study that showed men like to explore original videos while women seek further engagement with their favorite TV shows. The study confirmed that men will always act like children and women enjoy emotional attachment to fictional plots. Reading between the lines there's a message in there for traditional media. A lucrative market is clamoring for their content online. Hopefully this isn't news to the execs since the ...
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02.14.08Complications with asset valuationsGiving some link love to Fred for a great post on how Microsoft's investment in Facebook might make it's fight for Yahoo a bit more interesting. But I am saying that if you overvalue Facebook, you are also overvaluing myspace. And when the company you want to buy uses a myspace overpay to make itself less interesting to you, then you are the one who gets screwed.
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02.14.08The Market’s opinion of Microsoft-YahooBelow is a market snapshot of the past two weeks with tech heavyweights GOOG, YHOO, and MSFT. February 1 marks the date the market learned of the Microsoft's unsolicited $44B bid for Yahoo. What's the market think? Long-term YHOO investors believe the deal will happen and seem ready for an exit. After all, MSFT's $31 per share bid is a %60 premium on the stock. Google is regaining a few points from it's recent slide on the news. Meanwhile, Microsoft's beleaguered stock continues to decline, down 11% since the offer. Ouch.
recent posts
- The Wallstrip Edge [Book Terser]
- How to name your own price
- Keep your worthless predictions
- The Definitive Book of Body Language [Book Terser]
- Terse Reviews
- Flatten; because users are lazy.
- P(recession) = 1, P(American is shopper) = 1
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